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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: different trains of rollers, and are carried away, wrought iron
fit for bridging the creek, shoeing the mule and hooping the
barrel that brings the farmers apples into town.
"Life in these mills is a terrible life," the reformers say.
"Men are ground down to scrap and are thrown out as wreckage."
This may be so, but my life was spent in the mills and I failed
to discover it. I went in a stripling and grew into manhood with
muscled arms big as a bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say,
will destroy a man's lungs, but I worked all day in the mills and
had wind enough left to toot a clarinet in the band. I lusted for
labor, I worked and I liked it. And so did my forefathers for
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